BeneficiariesStella Kariuki, who participated in infoDev’s Mobile Startup Camp, founded Zege Technologies in 2010 to offer small and medium enterprises (SMEs) pay-bill numbers and mobile money point of... Show More + sales solutions to help make transactions paperless. Zege Technologies focuses on building financial solutions software for mobile, web, and point of sale integration. Its core product is MPAYER, which is a cloud-based payment service that helps local businesses, organizations and shoppers accept and manage real-time cash or mobile money payments, while collecting customer feedback. Thus far Zege Technologies has worked with 100 companies and served about 3,000 clients at the Base of the Pyramid. Stella has plans to expand the Kenyan customer base, promote regional expansion, and positively impact businesses in Kenya and within the region.Peter Chege initially worked as an analytical chemist at a pharmaceutical company in Kenya, but in 2002 he decided to venture out on his own and produc Show Less -

Washington, D.C., October 23, 2012—Local entrepreneurs in developing countries are finding it easier to do business than at any time in the last 10 years, highlighting the significant progress that has... Show More + been made in improving business regulatory practices across the globe, according to a new report released today by the World Bank and IFC.The report, Doing Business 2013: Smarter Regulations for Small and Medium-Size Enterprises, marks the 10th edition of the Doing Business series. Over the past decade, these reports have recorded nearly 2,000 regulatory reforms implemented by 180 economies. The reforms have yielded major benefits for local entrepreneurs across the globe. For example:Since 2005, the average time to start a business has fallen from 50 days to 30—and in low-income economies the average has been reduced by half.In the past eight years, the average time to transfer property fell by 35 days, from 90 to 55, and the average cost by 1.2 percentage points—from 7.1 percent of the Show Less -

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23, 2012–Most economies are recovering from the sharp drops in new firm registration triggered by the 2008 global financial crisis—an improvement that may have been bolstered by government... Show More + reforms, according to new World Bank data released today. In 2011, more than 60 percent of the world’s economies saw a faster pace of new firm registration than in the year before. That is almost double the 2009 rate of 34 percent, although it still lags behind the 2007 rate of 75 percent, according to the World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Database, which is updated every two years.Reforms that significantly reduce the time, cost, days and number of steps required to start a business—generally over a 50 percent reduction in any given measure recorded by the World Bank Group’s Doing Business series—have a real and sustainable impact on new firm registration, according to an analysis by economists in the World Bank’s Development Research Group.For example, Rwanda registered 4,500 new f Show Less -